Blog spam makes me look bad (potentially…)

I received an email today from someone who teaches here at EMU who came across some entries on my old blog. It seems he was a bit concerned and surprised to see so many spam messages, and a lot with all kinds of weird porn content. I hadn’t checked my old blog for a while; it turns out I had over 8500 comments. Oy vey….

The colleague in question here is tech-savvy enough to realize that these spam messages don’t reflect on me directly exactly, but his email reminded me of the problem of posting something– really, anything– on the ‘net. Once it’s there, it’s there forever. When I do a vanity search on myself, I inevitably come across email messages I posted to a mailing list years ago that is still “up there” and available via an archive space. The difference with blogs though is an old post on plagiarism or whatever is still a target for spammers who want to advertise some version of viagra or kiddie porn or something.

Anyway, I spent a fair amount of time this morning deleting some spam, but then I decided to take a different approach. In my ameaturish way with CSS and MT, I figured out a way to make it so comments won’t display. That ought to solve the problem in the short-term, though ultimately, I think what I will need to do is delete the old blog….

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I'm a writer and a professor at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan. You can learn more than you want to learn about me by clicking on "about." You can contact me by sending email to skrause at emich dot edu.